Nurse Bettie Bar

View from shelf bar looking towards entry

Located in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, this project is a funky bar with a 50’s pin-up girl theme which combines vintage and modern accents and fuses newer, sleek elements with those with a rough, patinaed edge. At approximately 415 sf, the size of the space posed a design challenge, as there was a strong desire to separate out different zones of activity within the bar. The front of the bar provides an area with banquette seating for group conversation that activates the bar’s entry, while beyond is the bar itself, which forms a peninsula wrapped by 50’s chrome bar stools. These also sit in front of the shelf bar which frames Nurse Bettie’s central space.

Project Team:
Vanessa Keith, Karolin Keilbar

Photos (c):
Tom Sibley Photography / Wilk Marketing Communications

Read more about the project at:

The banquette at the back of the bar is perhaps one of the most intimate spaces, and is envisioned as a space for conversation between two people. Lighting is incorporated into the backs of the banquettes and is allowed to gently wash the walls. The floor is exposed concrete and steel beams, and the bar itself has a base composed of multiple strips of salvaged blackened steel. The bar top is made of individual cubes of red oak with a dark stain and a steel edge. The bathroom has a clerestory window made from a salvaged Ratner’s door, and the door itself, also salvaged, has a wonderful patina of years’ worth of multiple layers of paint. The ceiling sports a collage of pin-ups from period magazines, and customers are challenged to find the one hidden image of the notorious Bettie Page. Reproductions of period artwork by Gil Elvgren grace the walls and are the work of Brian Life (www.brianlife.com).